I used to wonder about that myself and the only thing I could come up with is that RUssell, Lynch ultimately wear down the defense.We really fatigue defenses like I have never seen, you can just see the other team, hunched over, hands on their hips.I can only believe that is the reason.

This has really been bugging me as well. With all the draft picks, FA signings and making Tom Cable Oline and assistant head coach, we should be dominating average defenses like Atlanta. I find it really frustrating and can only hope that Carpenter comes back in shape and mows defensive linemen over.

I do believe however that the team was off kilter after all the long distance traveling and that it was partially to blame for our early struggles. that is why Pete was saying we needed to get homes field advantage next year.

Largent80 wrote:Why is nobody mentioning the defense letting Atlanta run roughshod all over us early as well?

We must tell Trufant that the game starts 4 hrs later than it actually does. His horrible play was instrumental in us giving up enough yardage for Atlanta to kick a field goal with 26 seconds on the clock. Maybe wrap him in duct tape and stick him in his locker just before kickoff. He used to be pretty good. Nowadays...not so much..

ivotuk wrote:This has really been bugging me as well. With all the draft picks, FA signings and making Tom Cable Oline and assistant head coach, we should be dominating average defenses like Atlanta. I find it really frustrating and can only hope that Carpenter comes back in shape and mows defensive linemen over.

I do believe however that the team was off kilter after all the long distance traveling and that it was partially to blame for our early struggles. that is why Pete was saying we needed to get homes field advantage next year.

ivotuk wrote:I do believe however that the team was off kilter after all the long distance traveling and that it was partially to blame for our early struggles. that is why Pete was saying we needed to get homes field advantage next year.

Thank you, I was starting to think I am the only one who believes traveling is difficult and most always shows up in the early part of games. It makes sense to me that after 150 point output and nothing more to play for the team might come out a little flat against the Rams and you should acknowledge the Rams have a good D-line and DC.

Washington we gave up 14 and didn't show any signs of life on offense or defense until the 2nd quarter. Atlanta was the second week of travel after losing two key players to the shit if a playing field at Fedex and a 10 am start and we didn't show signs of life until the 3rd quarter.

Am I imagining the pattern?

What bothers me is the NFL acknowledged last season how difficult it is to travel across the country to play so they modified east coast teams schedules (east coast only) so they wouldn't have to do it more than twice a year and in turn increased the number of miles and times that west coast teams have to travel east. Not only do the east coast teams already benefit from a 3 hour later start but now they are so pampered that west coast teams have to pick up the slack even when they already travel 3 times as far on average. Why would the NFL force Seattle to play a 10am game on top of back to back east coast trips? It makes no sense what so ever.

There have been studies done to test the effects of travel in professional sports. The ones featured in the book Scorecasting concluded that, outside of extreme scenarios like the occasional stretches of back-to-back-to-back road games in sequential days in MLB and the NBA, the amount of time spent traveling seems to have absolutely no effect whatsoever on the teams involved. Their best example of this, in my opinion, was how the minor league MLB teams with the most time-consuming travel schedules fared no worse in W/L percentage when compared to their respective league averages than the entirety of the NFL games played by two teams occupying the same state (IE every game between NYG/NYJ, WASH/BAL, DAL/HOU, etc). The most grueling travel schedule they could find had no discernible effect on wins and losses when compared to the least grueling.

In other words, travel distance/time isn't just an excuse for a loss, it's a baseless excuse. This is great news for teams like us who will continually be one of the most traveled teams. However, there might be something to be said about the effect of playing at different times during the day, and this possible issue would appear to be much less understood. I would expect this effect, assuming there even is an effect, to be related to the habits and routines of individual people on the team in the lead-up to an early game. If this is the case, the issues it presents may be a little different for each person but they'll never be insurmountable in nature. If we struggle at 10:00am it's because we allow ourselves to struggle at 10:00am.

Largent80 wrote:Why is nobody mentioning the defense letting Atlanta run roughshod all over us early as well?

We must tell Trufant that the game starts 4 hrs later than it actually does. His horrible play was instrumental in us giving up enough yardage for Atlanta to kick a field goal with 26 seconds on the clock. Maybe wrap him in duct tape and stick him in his locker just before kickoff. He used to be pretty good. Nowadays...not so much..

Hi there, you must be the guy off living in fantasy land where Gus called a press man cover on those plays instead of that horrendous zone blitz.

Blaming Tru for giving up those yards is dumber than saying we should have kicked the 65 yarder at the end of the game.

BirdsCommaAngry wrote:There have been studies done to test the effects of travel in professional sports. The ones featured in the book Scorecasting concluded that, outside of extreme scenarios like the occasional stretches of back-to-back-to-back road games in sequential days in MLB and the NBA, the amount of time spent traveling seems to have absolutely no effect whatsoever on the teams involved. Their best example of this, in my opinion, was how the minor league MLB teams with the most time-consuming travel schedules fared no worse in W/L percentage when compared to their respective league averages than the entirety of the NFL games played by two teams occupying the same state (IE every game between NYG/NYJ, WASH/BAL, DAL/HOU, etc). The most grueling travel schedule they could find had no discernible effect on wins and losses when compared to the least grueling.

In other words, travel distance/time isn't just an excuse for a loss, it's a baseless excuse. This is great news for teams like us who will continually be one of the most traveled teams. However, there might be something to be said about the effect of playing at different times during the day, and this possible issue would appear to be much less understood. I would expect this effect, assuming there even is an effect, to be related to the habits and routines of individual people on the team in the lead-up to an early game. If this is the case, the issues it presents may be a little different for each person but they'll never be insurmountable in nature. If we struggle at 10:00am it's because we allow ourselves to struggle at 10:00am.

That sounds good but there are studies that show the opposite as well. Answer me this, if it is no big deal then why did the NFL change the travel schedule for east coast teams (only) so they wouldn't have to make the grueling trip west more than twice a year. We seen this last year when Pittsburgh was suppose to travel to Seattle but do to the new guidelines, Seattle had to not only travel to Pittsburgh but also had to play at the 10 am time slot. A game we got massacred in.

Look up the win loss record of Seattle when playing at 10am vs afternoon or evening east coast games.

Edit: A game got massacred in and traveled nearly three times as far as Pitsburgh over the course of that season.

BirdsCommaAngry wrote:There have been studies done to test the effects of travel in professional sports. The ones featured in the book Scorecasting concluded that, outside of extreme scenarios like the occasional stretches of back-to-back-to-back road games in sequential days in MLB and the NBA, the amount of time spent traveling seems to have absolutely no effect whatsoever on the teams involved. Their best example of this, in my opinion, was how the minor league MLB teams with the most time-consuming travel schedules fared no worse in W/L percentage when compared to their respective league averages than the entirety of the NFL games played by two teams occupying the same state (IE every game between NYG/NYJ, WASH/BAL, DAL/HOU, etc). The most grueling travel schedule they could find had no discernible effect on wins and losses when compared to the least grueling.

In other words, travel distance/time isn't just an excuse for a loss, it's a baseless excuse. This is great news for teams like us who will continually be one of the most traveled teams. However, there might be something to be said about the effect of playing at different times during the day, and this possible issue would appear to be much less understood. I would expect this effect, assuming there even is an effect, to be related to the habits and routines of individual people on the team in the lead-up to an early game. If this is the case, the issues it presents may be a little different for each person but they'll never be insurmountable in nature. If we struggle at 10:00am it's because we allow ourselves to struggle at 10:00am.

Aren't most of the MLB & NBA games played in the afternoon or evenings when all the players are wide awake though?

Besides having a relatively large O-Line and a physical, beastly RB in Marshawn Lynch, a player like Wilson puts so much stress on a defense.

His agility, elusiveness, scrambling ability, and "compact size," as well as his strong arm, are enough to literally cripple an entire defense with exhaustion.

The front 7 of an opposing defense has to keep tabs on him and account for the read/option, or QB running threat at all times.

In addition, when the protection does break down and a pass rusher gets into the backfield, the fact that they have to pursue Wilson's dodging and speed is another thing that will leave the other team gassed. It's already a ton of work to wrestle your way pass a blocker but now you have to play tag with the QB too?! It's almost unfair. Against the 49ers pass rush, Wilson bought nearly 18 FREAKIN' SECONDS, dodging Smith and Brooks left and right, which is an ETERNITY by NFL standards. The ability to extend plays really fatigues a defense, over the course of 4 quarters.

Also, Wilson's cannon arm. You see in some games when a defense is playing a QB with limited arm strength, that after a certain while, once the WRs "run out of range" they will just stop or jog, and the DBs and LBs can "take it a bit easy" and catch their breath. But with Wilson, his arm strength means that more of the field is open to him, so DBs and LBs can literally never just take a play off covering someone. They have to play 100% until the whistle is blown because if they let their guard down, a receiver can slip pass them and Wilson has the arm to get the ball downfield. So this really tires down the secondary as well.

RichNhansom wrote:That sounds good but there are studies that show the opposite as well. Answer me this, if it is no big deal then why did the NFL change the travel schedule for east coast teams (only) so they wouldn't have to make the grueling trip west more than twice a year. We seen this last year when Pittsburgh was suppose to travel to Seattle but do to the new guidelines, Seattle had to not only travel to Pittsburgh but also had to play at the 10 am time slot. A game we got massacred in.

Look up the win loss record of Seattle when playing at 10am vs afternoon or evening east coast games.

Edit: A game got massacred in and traveled nearly three times as far as Pitsburgh over the course of that season.

I assume what you're referring to are the poorer W/L records that have been noted with teams when they travel coast-to-coast. If I'm not mistaken, this is also why, as you mentioned, the NFL is trying to reduce those types of trips even if only for east coast teams. If it's something more in depth than just W/L records in the NFL, I would love to hear more about that. However, if you're referring to what I think you're referring to, then that presents a problem with trying to analyze this because the two issues of traveling coast-to-coast would presumably stem from either the duration and distance of the trip or from playing at a different time than what a team is used to. The problem with looking at just the NFL is they have no equivalent of a coast-to-coast trip that doesn't involve different time-zones, which means those two issues cannot be looked at separately within the sport. (The longest travel distance between same time-zone teams occurs when NE and the teams in NY play the Florida-based teams but this is only like half the distance of a coast-to-coast trip.)

What I'm suggesting is the assertions of the guys debunking the effects of the time and distance of travel are correct and that the issues with travel stem from how they affect a player or coach's habits and routine in preparation for a game as well as other subtle facets of the "body clock" theory. If this is true, then the irony is that reducing the number of trips for a team probably hurts them in the long run because they'll be less acclimated to playing outside of their ideal game-time. This, at least to me, is as ridiculous as banning elevators because some people are claustrophobic.

It's difficult to base any kind of theory about the effects of coast-to-coast trips just from Seahawk games, let alone recent Seahawk games, because it's such a small sample size and the results you're looking at could be more of an indicator of us just typically be bad, average, and slightly above average compared to the rest of the league. When a game happens like us getting massacred by Pitt, it just might be that they were considerably better that day.

scutterhawk wrote:Aren't most of the MLB & NBA games played in the afternoon or evenings when all the players are wide awake though?

Most, yeah, or at least much more-so than NFL teams, but the issue of playing time as I understand isn't about what time during the day the game is at; it's about what time it's at relative to what a team is used to. MLB and NBA teams might not have to play as early in terms of their team's local time-zone as a west coast NFL team but they also play more road games more frequently and are probably some of the most acclimated athletes in being successful in such circumstances.